this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?

I don't want to get into "A says that B dropped acid" in a StubSack thread.

The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago

A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.

(source on Mastodon)

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Wes McKineny - Why Not

EDIT

I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that's all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

As a fellow homelabber, I would immediately ask: Have you isolated any of your homelab's functionality and shared it with the community? No? Why not? I'll give him a little credit, as he was one of the principal authors of Apache's Parquet format and Arrow library; he does know how to write code. But what did he actually produce with the vibecoding tools? Well, first he made a TUI for some fintech services, imitating existing plain-text accounting tools and presumably scratching his itch. (Last time I went shopping for such a tool, I found ticker.) After that, what's he built? Oh, he built a Claude integration, a Claude integration, and a Claude integration.

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter

It's a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.

The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it's also strategic malpractice. We've seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.

AI isn't going away. The question isn't whether to engage. It's whether we'll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others' decisions.

Short of wikipedia shipping it's own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it's not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.

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[–] jaschop@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

So, Copilot for VSCode apparently got hit with an 8.8 CVE in November for, well, doing Copilot stuff. (RCE if you clone a strange repo and promptfondle it.)

Fixes were allegedly released on Nov 12th, but I can't find anything in the Changelog on what those changes were, and how they would prevent Copilot from doing, well, Copilot stuff. (Although I may not be ITSec-savvy enough to know where such information would be found.)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Simon Willison defends stealing a Python library using lying machines, answering "questions" he previously "asked" in an attempt to downplay his actions.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago
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